is native to the northern waters from the Pacific West Coast to Sonora, Mexico. Since its introduction to China from Hawaii in 1998, its area and product have increased every year and have become one of the most widely produced shrimp species in China. It is suitable for growth at temperatures of 25-35℃; below 18℃, it stops feeding. Low temperature limits the farming season and area of , thus affecting the economic benefits. In order to explore the genes related to the low temperature tolerance of , hepatopancreases were chosen from the low temperature stress group (18℃) and the normal temperature group (24℃) of three families to conduct Illumina HiSeq 2500 sequencing. The analysis of the sequencing data via splicing, annotation, and differential expression revealed that a total of 214.6 million clean reads were obtained and assembled into 50921 final unigenes with an average length of 828 bp (N50=1534 bp). The assembled unigenes contained 14329 significant unigenes (28.13% of all unigenes) after BLASTX against the Nr database (E-value cut-off of 10^-5). Seven databases, Nr, Nt, GO, KEGG, Swiss-prot, KOG, and Pfam, were used to annotate 1573 unigenes, accounting for 3.08% of all unigenes. The results comparing the digital gene expression data between the challenged and control shrimp showed that under low temperature stress, the expression of 641 genes was up-regulated and 1036 genes were down-regulated in family 1; 630 genes were up-regulated and 1343 genes were down-regulated in family 2; and 212 genes were up-regulated and 475 genes were down-regulated in family 3. Furthermore, 243 genes were differentially expressed in all three families, including 89 and 154 genes whose expressions were up- and down-regulated, respectively, under low temperature stress. The functional enrichment analysis revealed that the differentially expressed genes were more abundant during binding, catalytic activity, the biosynthesis of amino acids, and peroxisome, lysosome, arginine, and proline metabolism. According to the Q-value, three of the top 10 genes included the ATP-binding cassette subfamily B member 6 (ABCB6), C-type lectin, and glutamine synthetase (GS). The ABCB6 gene encodes the ABC transporter and participates in the ABC transport mechanism. It has been found that the ABC transporter is involved in many abiotic stresses in plants. C-type lectin, as an immunological factor, plays an important role in the innate immune defense, and it has been demonstrated that temperature can affect its expression in both . Glutamine synthase (GS) is involved in the regulation of ammonia nitrogen metabolism in crustaceans. Studies have shown that temperature can affect the metabolism of ammonia nitrogen in . C-type lectin and GS are both down-regulated under low temperature stress, so they may participate in the low temperature response mechanisms of , but further verification is needed. In this study, we selected 10 genes from 243 differentially expressed genes; five of the genes were up-regulated and five were down-regulated. Real time RT-PCR was used to verify the transcriptome sequencing results. The results showed that RNA-seq and real time RT-PCR produced similar expression patterns for the 10 different genes, which indicates that the differential gene expression results based on the transcriptome sequencing were credible. This study laid the foundation for the discovery of low temperature-related genes and molecular markers. It also provides a theoretical basis for in-depth discussion on the molecular determinant mechanism of low temperature resistance in in future studies.